| History |  |
The Berlin Museumsinsel is a complex of buildings
composed of individual museums of outstanding historical and artistic importance located in the heart of the city. continue... | | History | |
Development of the part of the Spreeinsel now known as the Museumsinsel began when the pleasure garden (Lustgarten) for the Stadtschloß (palace) in the 16th century. However, its present importance began when the Altes Museum was built
to the designs of Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1824-28.
A plan to develop the part of the island behind this museum, hitherto used for commercial purposes as a "sanctuary for the arts and sciences", was drawn up in 1841 by the court
architect, Friedrich August Stüler, on the orders of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The first element of this plan to be built was the Neues Museum (1843-47). The next step did not take place until 1866, when the Nationalgalerie, the work of Johann Heinrich Strack, was built.
Another two decades passed before the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (now the Bodemuseum) was built in 1897-1904 to the designs of Ernst von Ihne, and Stüler's plan was completed in 1909-30 with the construction of Alfred Messel's Pergamonmuseum. | | Description | |
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The individual buildings erected in the course of the 19th century by the most renowned German architects form a unique complex that serves purely museological purposes and constitutes a town-planning highlight in the fabric of the city in the shape of a kind of city crown.
The Museumsinsel bears architectural testimony to the new institution of the art museum that began to emerge in Europe following the French Revolution as an important institution of middle-class self-perception. The Museumsinsel illustrates in addition - as seen from the chronological order of its individual museums - the change that the institution of the art museum underwent from the beginning of the 19thcentury up to the 20th century, being first the central place of middle-class educational aspirations, then becoming a place of national identity, and ultimately allying itself with the
gesture of imperial power.
The Museumsinsel is an architectural example of a type of building that testifies to an
important stage in the development of human history. The different designs of the Museumsinsel's individual museum buildings illustrate in a confined space the typological
development of the European art museum from a middleclass temple of education (Altes Museum, Nationalgalerie) and from there to the exhibit building of plain design which gives pride of place to the work of art exhibited (interior of
the Pergamonmuseum). Furthermore, the individual museum buildings harmonize so well with each other in design terms that the Museumsinsel presents the art museum as a building type in a unique architectural and urban design manner.
The complex of the Museumsinsel consists of five museum buildings.
The Altes Museum
This is a two-storey structure with a rectangular ground plan on a high base with its exhibition rooms ranged round two inner courts and a central two-storey domed rotunda with skylight. The side and rear elevations are relatively plain, but
that facing the site of the former Schloß is a high portico supported on eighteen sandstone Ionic columns and two corner pilasters. Access is by means of a seven-bay wide stairway with broad stringers.
The Neues Museum
The layout of the Neues Museum is comparable with that of the Altes Museum, but the rotunda of the latter is replaced by the monumental main staircase. Unlike the Altes Museum, to which it was originally linked by a passageway, it is a relatively plain structure, more in the style of the Schinkel school. Its articulation comes from a high proof parapet with corner sculptures, plain window frames with the mullions decorated with figures of children, cornices, and corner
pilasters.
Much of the decorative sculpture was destroyed by wartime bombardment, but some elements have been restored and replaced.
The richly decorated interior contrasts with the plain exterior. Much of the original ornamentation was destroyed, but the furnishings around the second inner courtyard (the "Greek Courtyard"), including the monumental frieze depicting the
destruction of Pompeii, have survived virtually intact.
There is an interesting innovative structural feature. The traditional low-vaulted ceilings of timber beams and masonry are replaced on the third floor by an arch-cord construction using cast-iron arches and pairs of wrought-iron chords. This
lightweight form of construction was necessitated by the poor foundation parameters.
The Nationalgalerie
A high ashlar block-like base with rectangular windows is surmounted by a Corinthian pseudo-dipteral temple of in antis type with an open portico. There are also high rectangular windows in the exterior wall set back behind the
columns. The rear is in the form of a semi-circular conch. A double-winged open staircase with five flights of steps leads
up to the pedimented portico with its Corinthian columns. The building is clad throughout with Nebra sandstone.
The four-storey building has a rectangular ground plan with apse-like terminal features. There is a cellar and an exhibition floor in the basement section and two exhibition halls in the superstructure. It is lavishly decorated with
symbolic imagery in the form of sculptures, reliefs, and paintings. The upper exhibition floor was originally laid out as a vast banqueting hall, but is now converted for displays.
The Gardens
The gardens overlooked by the Nationalgalerie fill the space defined by the Neues Museum, the Bodestraße, and the embankment of the Spree. They are laid out in a simple formal design, replacing the original elaborate layout with colonnades and pavilions.
The Bodemuseum
This Neo-Baroque structure is in a commanding position on the north-western tip of the island. Clad in sandstone and with a low stone base, it rises to two storeys, linked by Corinthian pilasters and crowned with a balustrade. The longitudinal elevations have two pedimented side projections with double Corinthian three-quarter columns. The rounded entrance frontage is decorated with the same columns and
with rounded open arches.
The entrance with its impressive staircase is beneath the smaller of the two domes. It gives on to two lateral wings and a centre section which are linked by transverse sections so as to form five inner courtyards. The main room of the
museum, the so-called Basilica, is modelled on the domed church of San Salvatore al Monte in Florence, and is embellished with works of art that give it the appearance of a Renaissance church interior.
The Pergamonmuseum
This three-winged museum was built to exhibit the greatly expanded collections of antiquities resulting from German excavations at Pergamon and other Greek sites in Asia Minor as well as those from Mesopotamia formerly housed in the
Vorderasiatisches Museum.
In style it is restrained, in the Schinkel tradition but in a modern idiom and also suggestive of classical architecture. It
rises directly from the Spree, like the Bodemuseum, with which it is harmonized in scale and proportions. The centre block and the side wings are windowless, given structure by
flat giant pilasters and steep pediments.
There are archaic features such as the Doric half-columns and the stepped central superstructure.
Some changes to elements of the exterior design were imposed upon the architect, Alfred Messel, but the overall block-like modernity of his conception overcomes the increase in the eaves height, the flattening of the pediments, and the addition of a metope and triglyph frieze.
The Bridges
The Montbijou Bridge, in front of the Bodemuseum, is a two-arch structure in Baroque style, and the Iron Bridge at the end of the Bodestraße.
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